(Note: Luke is heading to Indonesia for some vay-cay, then on to serve in Iraq for a time)
Cameron: stay outta trouble over there in the sandbox man
we need to see you come back in one piece
Luke: in Indonesia, or Iraq? because i’m honestly more concerned about dying in Jakarta than i am Baghdad
Cameron: def, al-queda nightclub blasts watch out
Luke: hella tourists are dying from weird homemade alcohol
which makes me want to try it even more.
Add this onto your list of restaurants to visit in Tokyo.
(The super simple menu is limted to a Quarter Pounder, Double Quarter Pounder, fries and drinks):
(click to enlarge)
It’s Official…Everything in Japan is better. – A Continuous Lean.
With regard to my air travel experiences, I’ve always been the exception to the rule. While others complain about lost bags and missed connections, I’ve always found flights to have fantastic food, friendly stewards, and ne’er have I had a bag lost by an airline.
This year, that’s starting to change. In July, Olympic Airlines disappointed me by not allowing me to carry my skateboard onboard the aircraft (they confiscated it). The meal on that flight was inedible. Cornbread like a brick, a mini-hot dog that had a rubbery consistency, and a mini-brownie that tasted like chalk and felt like a sponge.
On my United flight last week, I was charged $15 to check my 1st bag. Now, Continental is doing the same.
As an economist, I think prices should reflect services rendered, in order to pass on costs only to those that use the service. What pisses me off about the United bag fee is that is was never disclosed to me before I bought the ticket. Fare-search engines like Kayak.com and Expedia.com should ask how many bags you plan to check, and adjust the flight cost accordingly. This way, you might find that a $250 roundtrip flight on Alaska might actually be less expensive than a $225 roundtrip fare on United or Continental, considering the $30 fee to check a bag each way.
If a fee is not disclosed, it’s unethical.
Here are a few photos from my trip in Greece from last month:
(click on them individually to enlarge)
We ran into this little animal inside the Starbucks in Varkiza:
I thought London was wealthy — here in Athens, it’s out of control! Last night, we went to a nightclub called Island with Patrick and Pavlos to celebrate the American College of Greece’s commencement, and the parking lot consisted of a Ferrari F430 Spyder, a Ferrari 599, a Porsche Turbo, an Audi R8, an Aston Martin DB V8, a BMW M6, various Range Rovers, Lotuses; the list goes on. I’ve never seen any parking lot quite like it (though I imagine car meetups in Dubai would blow this out of the water!)
Here are the comparatively humble shots of London’s supercars from our visit last week:
Given that Athens and the surrounding Greek islands are to be my home this summer, I’ve been doing some research on Greek history. One name that keeps popping up is Eleftherios Venizelos, a prolific Greek statesman who was at the country’s helm as Crete revolted from Ottoman rule and became a part of Greece. Venizelos was the deciding factor in Greece’s decision to side with the allies (the Triple Entente) in World War I. The Greek King, Constantine, was related by blood to the German monarchy and hence supported the Central Powers. The fact that Venizelos was able to prevail over his own King speaks of his power and tact. Due to Mr. Venizelos’ alliance with the Entente, he was granted a seat at the Treaty of Paris, where the winners of the war divided up the spoils. Greece then received the Dodecanese Islands, some coastal areas in West Turkey (Smyrna/Izmir and Thrace), which brought the newly enlarged Greek empire to the Constantinople’s doorstep (the Greeks had long dreamed of owning an empire that included Constantinople and coastal Anatolia).
When I first came upon his surname, Venizelos, I thought it must’ve been an ancient progenitor of the name of modern Venezuela (many cities in South America are named after cities in Europe). I found the true story to be much more interesting: Amerigo Vespucci, upon seeing villages built atop stilts in South America, was reminded of Venice’s homes and decreed that the land was to be called Venezuola, meaning “little Venice” in Italian. It was later hispanicized using a Spanish diminutive form -zuela, and hasn’t changed since.
I’m thinking of traveling through the Middle East this summer, and in the course of my research, I’ve read a ton about Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
The U.S. State Department gives an idea of what Syria’s economy is like:
“Syria is a middle-income, developing country with an economy based on agriculture, oil, industry, and tourism. However, Syria’s economy faces serious challenges and impediments to growth, including: a large and poorly performing public sector; declining rates of oil production; widening non-oil deficit; wide scale corruption; weak financial and capital markets; and high rates of unemployment tied to a high population growth rate. In addition, Syria currently is the subject of U.S. economic sanctions…”
Sounds like a basket case. It’s pretty sad when runaway population growth causes increasing unemployment.
“Agriculture [...] accounts for 25% of GDP and employs 42% of the total labor force.”
I’ve got to say, that’s really sad. It’s 2008 — wave of the future and all — and Syria has nearly half its workforce doing the menial labor of growing and gathering food. I’m pretty sure that the characters on the show Lost manage to employ less than 20% of their population gathering food.
In the United States, only 1.8% of of workers are employed in agriculture, which allows the other 98% to pursue whatever it is they choose.
Today, I was walking down Fifth Avenue, dribbling my soccer ball home, when all of a sudden a car honks at me. I see its window rolling down, so I peer into the car, and some guy yells out “Cameron! Is that you?”.
Immediately I realize it’s Steven, a young man I met in Nice less than three months ago, and ran into at Gare du Nord in Paris by chance the next week.
It’s a small world.
It reminded me of some other small world stories I’ve experienced.
My roommate Nathan introduced me to Ben A, one of his schoolmates. Ben A has a cousin who goes to University of Oregon. Nathan and I went to Whistler over Martin Luther King weekend, and we ended up randomly meeting a group of girls from the University of Oregon who we hung out with for the remainder of the trip, and one of them, it turned out, was Maddie – Ben A’s cousin.
It’s fantastic when these kinds of stories get a little more interesting. It did. In August, I was sipping a doppio espresso at Starbucks on Avenue de l’Opera in Paris, and was startled to hear a young lady’s voice blurt out “Cameron?!?”
I turned around, only to find Ben A’s cousin Maddie again, a world away from the snowy Canada where we’d met.
Que le monde est petit !
Upon telling another friend, Stephanie, about my small world experience in Whistler and Paris, she went ahead and trumped mine:
“My junior year of high school I had a class with a Belgian exchange student who was studying at Ballard High School for the year. She left and after that and I thought I’d never see her again. On my first day of class at the University of Granada in Spain, guess who sits down right next to me??? The Belgian exchange student herself.”
¡Qué casualidad!
In an trivial yet interesting twist, Stephanie’s long lost friend from elementary school, Asia, by chance ended up in the same study abroad program in Granada – even though they go to different universities back home. By chance, I know Asia through my old roommate Nathan, the same Nathan who introduced me to Ben A in the first place.
Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder confessed today he didn’t know until Tuesday that people spoke English in London. Crowder, a former Florida Gator and Atlanta native, apparently isn’t sure where the plane is headed when it takes off this afternoon for Sunday’s game against the New York Giants at London’s Wembley Stadium. “I couldn’t find London on a map if they didn’t have the names of the countries,” Crowder said. “I swear to God. I don’t know what nothing is. I know Italy looks like a boot. I learned that.”
“I know (Washington Redskins linebacker) London Fletcher. We did a football camp together. So I know him. That’s the closest thing I know to London. He’s black, so I’m sure he’s not from London. I’m sure that’s a coincidental name.”
Via The Palm Beach Post.
Bought some kicks and a gift at the Kitson boutique on Robertson boulevard. There was a Rolls-Royce Phantom parked out front, confirmation that I was in good company.
We went shopping at the Grove, just east of Beverly Hills. Probably checking out Kitson on Robertson Boulevard later.
